There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America's leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.

Which is to say that Apple's playing checkers while Google plays chess.

For better or worse, this is exactly why many people seem to hold Google in higher regard than they do Apple. Both Apple and Google are rich and wealthy beyond average-person-measure. Now, which company will be liked more: the one that uses said wealth to develop crazy may-or-may
-not-work technologies that can change the world at a massively substantial scale, or the one that stuffs $150 billion in shady bank accounts to avoid having to pay taxes?

The more wealth you hoard, the less sympathetic people will be towards you. Unless, of course, you use that wealth in a very public way.

they are packagers, or in some cases re-packagers. Their most famous current employee is the head of their design dept, and their CEO is a supply-chain guy, period.

Furthermore, Google is really not "inventing" driverless cars either. They are mainly turning other people's research into an advertisement vector, because audiences in transit are as captive audience as they come. Google in a sense is a mega ad agency.

People need to see corporations for what they are, not for whatever need for dramatization would like them to be.

Bingo. Every innovation ever produced is built on previous work. There are tens of thousands of teams out there working on autonomous vehicles. Google is trying to get them the last mile. Not entirely unlike Apple did for smartphones. Neither invented the idea, they are just making them work for the average person.